The birth of Ottilie Landauer takes place in April, while construction of the Landauer House is still underway. The event begins a life repeatedly connected to the house: first as the home her mother hopes to bring her to, later as a space appropriated by Nazi authorities and repurposed for medical care, and finally as an architectural landmark visited by strangers. Ottilie’s arrival and the house’s changing uses make private family history inseparable from the political history of the building.

Birth and Early Family Life

The Landauers choose a clinic birth under the care of Doctor Živan Jelínek, who had studied the Twilight Sleep technique in Freiburg. Hana Hanáková had suggested using morphine to ease delivery; scopolamine was also administered, leaving Liesel Landauer with no memory of the birth. Ottilie’s arrival is thus presented through a deliberate gap in maternal recollection, even as the account specifies the medical method and the drugs used.

When Rainer von Abt visits the building site in late April, Liesel invites him to meet the baby. She describes Ottilie as beautiful and perfect, dwelling on her fingers, hands, and miniature nails. Her delight is unalloyed: although she has heard that some mothers experience depression after giving birth, she feels exultant. Yet she turns quickly from her daughter to the house, asking about its progress and saying that she wants to bring Ottilie there. Motherhood and the unfinished home are already joined in her imagination.

Ottilie’s baptism is a small private ceremony for family and godparents at the Church of the Minorites on Jánská. She wears white silk; her godmother, Hana, wears black. The contrast between the small, soft baby and the tall, worldly Hana gives the ceremony a striking visual form. Viktor Landauer watches from the background beside Hana’s husband, Oskar Hanák, who wonders aloud whether the baby is beautiful without making clear whether he means Ottilie or his own wife. The priest’s ritual prompts Viktor to recall his Jewish childhood and question the idea that human beings are born sinful; Oskar answers by invoking the war. The scene places Ottilie’s welcome into the family amid differences in religious memory and belief.

Growing Up as the House Takes Shape

The narrative sets the baby’s development against the slower construction of the house. Ottilie’s first grasp, the focusing of her eyes, her first smile, her recognition of Liesel and then Viktor, her first effort to raise herself on her hands, and her first laugh mark a rapid sequence of changes. The building advances through steel beams, poured concrete, and enclosed space, but delays, material shortages, and disagreements stretch across summer and autumn. The parallel makes two kinds of growth visible: intimate changes in a child and the measured, contested making of a home.

When the house’s shell is finally complete in winter, there is no ceremony to mark it. The family approaches it with apprehension, and it initially resembles a warehouse rather than a home. This subdued arrival contrasts with the intimate ceremony surrounding Ottilie’s baptism. The house is not simply a finished possession: it is a structure whose meaning will depend on who occupies it and what they make it serve.

The House’s Changing Uses

The later history of the Landauer House gives Ottilie’s birth a significance beyond family chronology. Under Nazi control, the building is transformed into a biometric research centre. Upstairs rooms become offices, the kitchens are converted into a laboratory, and the Glass Room is partitioned for measurement and photographic work. Scales, height-measuring equipment, callipers, a camera, and documentation machines replace the domestic arrangements of the Landauer household. Only the Bösendorfer piano remains as a conspicuous remnant of the home’s former life.

In a later period, the Glass Room serves as a children’s gymnasium. Tomáš calls it by a name that also suggests peace and quiet, and he values the light-filled space as a place where he can spend time with Zdenka after work. A public discussion of the building identifies it as the Landauer House in the Blackfield district, designed by Rainer von Abt and regarded in architectural circles as his masterpiece. The shift from family home to Nazi facility to place of treatment shows how the same modernist interior can be made to serve sharply different purposes.

Preservation and Return

By 1990, the house is maintained as a landmark, though repairs are described as poor. Some original furniture is returned from the Moravian Museum, bathroom fittings are updated, and plate glass is restored to the Glass Room. Visitors include groups from fraternal Soviet states, tourists, and architecture students interested in von Abt’s place in modernist history. The restoration tries to recover the building’s former appearance, but its accumulated uses remain part of its history.

Shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Marie Delmas travels from Paris to Město after recognizing a photograph of the house in a book on modern architecture. The text’s movement from Ottilie’s birth to the later transformations and visitors turns the house into a record of changing ownership, political power, care, and memory. Ottilie’s birth begins the family story attached to it, but the house’s subsequent reinventions ensure that her arrival is set within a history larger than the household.